Headline, March14, 2013

'''TEN BILLION HYDROGEN BOMBS'''

Very very few objects seem as familiar as the Sun. There it is, there it is, up in the sky every sunny day  -yet few are so strange. Look through a solar telescope, and the quotidian yellow disk is transformed into a dynamic wonderland, where planet-size prominences rise into black space like glowing jellyfish, only to loop and slither back hours or days later, as if enthralled by some unseen force.

 As indeed they are. Neither solid,  liquid, nor gas, the Sun is made up of plasma, the ''fourth'' state of the matter. This fourth state forms when atoms are stripped down to naked protons and electrons. All those charged particles make the solar plasma a splendid conductor of electricity  -much much more conductive than copper wire. The Sun is also packed with magnetic fields. Most remain buried under the Sun's massive girth, but some magnetic pipes, as thick as the Earth is wide, emerge on the surface as sunspots.

This magnetism choreographs the slithery dance in the sun's atmosphere and powers the solar wind, flinging outward a million tons of plasma every second at a million miles an hour!!

Driving all this activity is the intriguingly intricate machinery of an unexceptional star. The Sun's core   - a seething, 27-million-degree Fahrenheit plasma spheroid six times as dense as Gold  -fuses 700 million tons of protons into helium nuclei every second, releasing the energy of 10 Billion Hydrogen Bombs in the process. The core throbs gently, expanding when fusion rates climb and contracting when they damp down. Superimposed on this slow, deep heartbeat are myriad other rhythms, ranging from a 11 year sunspot cycle to rhythms spanning centuries.

The energy produced by the fusion in the Sun's core is carried outward by high energy photons as they ricochet through a dense maze of ions and electrons. Matter is so tightly packed in this radiation zone that it takes more than 100,000 years for the photons to emerge into the surrounding convection zone, 70 per cent of the way out of the solar center. After a month or so more, the photons emerge into the photosphere, the part of the Sun that we see. From there it takes a mere eight minutes to reach the Earth as Sunlight 

And as one might expect, this titanic thermonuclear furnace makes a lot of noise. The Sun rings like a Bell in millions of distinct tones!!   Hey, hey,  now where are the Wireless companies selling Ring Tones??!!

Hahahaah!!

With respectful and fearful dedication to the power of nature and to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless